MPAA: Kings of Irony

Here's a quick timeline: ~2000: Anyone who could afford a DVD drive for their computer could rip movies with some minor hassle with free tools floating around the internet. ~2003: The free tools become easily usable by anyone with a brain stem and interest in doing so. The programs crack DVD encryption methods with frankly embarrassing ease and speed. 2007: RealNetworks tries to make a legitimate tool for ripping DVDs while leaving in some DRM (i.e., restrictions on use). 2008: The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) sues them for aiding infringement. The EFF files a brief supporting RealNetworks position, basically claiming it is fair use to copy your own DVDs and people have been doing it for almost a decade. Today: MPAA mocks the EFF for "living in the past". So, with dozens of commonly used programs out there for backing up DVDs - a perfectly reasonable thing to do, since the lifespan of data on commercial hard drives is basically infinite if you back it up properly - the MPAA decides to target one that actually keeps the encryption that they original put on the disks. Their definition of the past is pretty funny too, since (eight years ago/today/in the foreseeable future) DVD backup (was/is/will continue to be) easy and legal under the terms of fair use and really, really easy. I'm kinda surprised RealNetworks even found a market for it with the number of effective free tools out there.

The i9/11 and the iPATRIOT Act

Excellent, excellent talk on the future of the internet with some very smart people. Jonathan Zittrain: Author of "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It" (available free here). Lawrence Lessig: Lawyer and author of dozens of books about free culture, recently having switched from talking about copyright specifically to a more broad range of IT and government corruption issues. Vin Cerf: He basically invented the internet with two other guys. No, really. Currently he is Google's chief internet evangelical (that is his real job title). The whole video is good, but the thing that stands out the most is a comment made by Lessig - the PATRIOT Act wasn't written really quickly in the wake of 9/11, it was sitting in a desk drawer waiting for the opportunity to be passed by a frantic legislature. He asked Richard Clarke, former chief counterterrorism advisor to numerous presidents, if a version of the PATRIOT Act for the internet was waiting for some kind of major internet-based attack which could be compared to 9/11 in terms of disruption and financial loss. Clarke said that, without question, there was. The heart of the problem is our national infrastructure is based on a system that our representatives are largely entirely ignorant of. Here is Senator Ted Stevens demonstrating such ignorance. Here is John McCain admitted to not knowing how to use a computer, much less the internet. None of this would be a problem, except these are the kind of people that can (at least attempt) to legislate internet activity in the country. And when some major incident occurs, which is inevitable due to the open nature of the internet, they may kill the largest and most important communication/content/distribution instrument ever conceived by humankind.

The artificial barrier of licensing, a GIS/Surveying example

There was news recently of a feature story pulled from a professional survey magazine because the work in question was, according to the State Licensing Board, depicting activities that should only be done by licensed surveyors rather than GIS professionals or anyone else. James Fee doesn't know what part of this mess is the worst, but I'd like to take an amateur stab at it. The artificial barrier that government licenses produce can in fact be a good thing when the occupation is such that a minimum standard is required to avoid large-scale fraud, but in so many cases could probably be done by private organizations. Many are put in place by a vocal and monied minority in an attempt to create what amounts to a cartel. I believe one example involved a manicure license that costed thousands of dollars. Professional survey licensing may fall under this, but my limited knowledge of that industry compels me to limit such rhetoric. This isn't the biggest problem with what occurred. Actually, the biggest problem wasn't even the suggestion GIS professionals - or for that matter, simply knowledgable members of the public with increasingly cheap GPS devices - are not competent to do location based field work. For so much geographic data, a 10m resolution is a godsend where previously no one was collecting data. And as more nations put up satellites it will likely become even finer resolution for smaller and more casual devices. This is not to suggest there isn't a place for professional surveyors - both for ultimate liability responsibility and expertise with the more effective tools and procedures. But the percieved elitism is somewhat disconserting. As a GIS/programming guy, I don't find anything I do so absurdly difficult that it would pain my eyes to read an article about an amatuer trying it. The biggest problem is that a state licensing board can effectively kill an article. There isn't any way in which this is a good thing, and I hope whoever has their hands on it leaks it to the internet.

Losing the Argument: Why the Democratic party is probably doomed

Elections are not simply about the raw numbers or even the shifting of legislatures. They often represent the public's perception of right and wrong - a national discourse on where the country is headed and whether it should stay on that path. The elections of 2006 was a victory more about the excesses of the former Congress rather than the arguments for the current one. A good portion of the public felt betrayed by the selling of the war-turned-occupation in Iraq, by rampant mismanagement of federal institutions (FEMA being the poster child), and of the corruption and fraudulence of the individual legislators. I would submit there was not a kind of national argument made by the Democrats that framed the election beyond. It was basically: we don't like these guys and we want someone else to do something different. This is the opposite of the other blow-out election of recent history, the Republican takeover of the legislature in the mid 90s. Here, there was a concerted argument made for a reorientation of the path the nation was taking. It didn't make this argument by itself, but was the result of deep resentment by both social and fiscal conservatives for more than a decade driven by not just one or two wedge issues but a complete ideology. And the Republicans didn't simply take these issues individuals, but as a total and (relatively) coherent vision. The evidence this represented a general shift to the right is not difficult to find. The same has not happened in 2006. There was no Contract With America, no grand vision. Or if there was, it has been utterly decimated by triangulated, tactical voting with no thought to a long term strategy. By voting record, there is very little to distinguish the Congress of 2006 from their predecessor on the topics that were at the forefront of the election: the war in Iraq, civil liberties, agency competence, and accountability of the Bush Administration. Nothing at all truly significant was done on these fronts. And the Democrats in 1994 were in a much more powerful position with a popular president (who regardless largely conformed to the ideology of the opposition). Large scale ideological movements are an extremely powerful force in history: the liberal revolutions of the 18th and early 19th centuries which created this country and profoundly changed others, the rise of Facism and Communism in the early 20th century, and at a national level, the rise of the modern American conservative movement. These powerful forces are founded on intellectual arguments that were extremely compelling in their own time and place - some continue to be so and others have been refuted with horrible loss of life and human dignity, but it would unwise to doubt their power. Democrats have not made an intellectual argument on this vein and their majority will be ephemeral if they do not. Their activities on basic issues that were provided as the reasoning to vote for them - checking executive power, the war, securing civil liberties, were not really pursued, much less some larger ideological goal. It has become simply the party of everyone who isn't a Republican for whatever reason. When the excesses and unpopularity of the current batch of Republicans is forgotten, they will still have an argument. Even a poor ideology trumps none at all. They could fix this by coming together and deciding why they are against the things the Republicans are for and visa-versa. Right now it is a mishmash which suggests they could change their tune at the drop of a hat (and judging by their voting records, they will). Republicans can rightly attack them as having no core principles or values because as a party they don't seem to. Don't believe me? Try a Google search of "democratic party mission statement". The whole first page is either local party offices with statements that mean nothing (the Maricopa County party's mission is just to get elected; okay guys, what then?). The actual party website is not much better, nothing in their "What we stand for" page is an argument - never is it explained why they believe what they do and what that means for policy. The RNC website is no better, but their ideological argument was really made here. The original contract is actually kind of interesting to read because the parts about government transparency are so completely counter to the current party's actions when it last had the majority it is quite stunning.

Political spam emails and computer safety.

"Fwd: FWD: Fwd: fwd: OBAMA TO DISARN THE MILITARY!" reads one of those mass spam political emails. Surely everyone has somehow received one of these at some point. No doubt they are extremely popular because they confirm already established assumptions about a candidate. The internet has a wonderful way of justifying any opinion or claim because all human beings are characterized by some measure of credulity. The body of the email contained a link to a video in which Obama was said to have laid out this particular stance. Long have the creators of malicious code used gripping headlines to pull unsuspecting individuals on to suspicious websites. The Storm Worm is a classic example that persists to this day, creating an army of zombie computers ready to attack anyone or anything for hire. The email that is the subject of this post linked back to a throwaway Wordpress site and was originally sent by an email address consisting of what appeared to be part of an MD5 hash. Besides involving Nigerian banks, there isn't much more an email can do to find itself on the radar of a moderately aware user. Before trashing it, I alerted everyone it was sent to it might be dangerous. The final humor of this scenario is the the person who sent this to me is still miffed I suggested it was a possible attack site. I had assumed they were already compromised and it was automatically being sent to everyone in their contacts list. It hadn't occurred to me it might just be stupid rather than a security concern. Better safe than sorry though - I recommend the new and extremely popular Firefox 3 web browser with Adblock Plus and the NoScript addons. (As an aside: the funny part is I would be really happy if this particular email was true. The United States spends more on its military than the entire rest of the world combined. I'm reminded of the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, possibly the last competent person with some measure of integrity to hold the office of President:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

This was no pacifist. He was Supreme Allied commander in the European theater and served with distinction before then. He'd never be elected today with these views, and anyone trying to claim we face a greater threat today than the Soviet empire at the end of the 50s is either fooling themselves or needs to pick up a history book.)

The viable solution to internet piracy

The sad fact of the matter is piracy as it is currently defined cannot be stopped without enormous breaches of privacy. Absent the restriction of tools to even create programs that can effortlessly defeat protection methods, you can't stop people from copying digital information. Mostly because the mere act of being on the internet means you are required to copy things just to view/listen to them. This is a sample of some of the points of a paper I recently read at Cato called The Future of Copyright. My personal favorite part:

When American troops liberated the city of Luxembourg in 1944, they made a strange capture: a machine capable of recording sound on magnetic tapes. Shortly after the war, this German military invention made its appearance in private homes. Tape recorders integrated listening and reproduction in one device, but as separate functions. That’s no longer the case with digital technology. Today, to use digital information is to copy it.

Computers operate by copying. They couldn’t care less whether the physical distance between original and copy is measured in micrometers or in miles; both work equally well for them. Copyright law, on the other hand, must somehow draw a line between use and distribution. That means putting an imaginary grid over the chaotic myriad of network nodes, delineating clusters of devices that can be attributed to individuals or households.

Every person reading this article is actually copying it illegally. You can't help but do it. As you surf the internet your computer is constantly caching (saving locally) data that you are viewing. Anyone who has ever used the internet for anything is almost certainly a pirate. I'll let you all off with a warning this time. Humor aside, the problem is one that the music industry found itself in a long while ago with the invention and mass adoption of radio. John Philip Sousa was convinced anything but live shows would completely destroy music. The solution, after much complaining, was to just license the distributor. Now of course the distributor and consumer and creator is anyone and everyone on the internet. The compromise is an idea that is not new and is even talked about by both sides of the issue with increasing interest: mass public electronic media licensing. If everyone on the internet is a pirate, license everyone. Everyone who wants to buy in at least. You've solved 99% of your piracy problems by facing the reality of a system, the internet, that requires copying. You also don't even have to host the files themselves, users are more than willing to do so. The idea has merit but the problem is the pie to be divided. We need an organization as trusted as the Nielsen statistics are for downloaded media content to correctly award creators and their labels/studios/whatever. The only alternatives are to entire restrict piracy with the kind of locking down that would destroy the internet and privacy in general (people could still just rip stuff from friends/renters) OR to see an attempt to destroy internet and privacy while the major content holders die a slow and painful (for everyone involved) death at the hands of unrelenting technological innovation. Edit: Hahaha. Bonus quote from a Guardian article linked from the Cato piece:

"For somebody who has spent 30 years in the music industry, you instinctively know this stuff is going on. But when you actually sit looking at your computer and see a number that says 95% of people are copying music at home, you suddenly go, 'Bloody hell'," he said.

Turns out you could nuke the internet from orbit and the current copyright model is doomed. Note: Copying this work is no longer actually illegal in any sense, since I have licensed everything with Creative Commons.

Geography, law, and leaving things up to the states to decide

The problem here is not that some states are unusually incompetent or corrupt (I'm looking at you Texas), but because people move more frequently and federal law has ballooned into places where the original signers of the Constitution never envisioned. Take the current rather bigoted opposition to gay marriage and throw transsexuals into the mix: the equation becomes hilariously/tragically more complicated. Money quote from the NYT article on the subject (registration is free but I don't like to encourage sites to put up that trash, so I recommend BugMeNot, an addon for Firefox that you should try to only use legally):

Urging the United States Supreme Court to tackle the issue in 2000, lawyers for Christie Lee Littleton, a Texas male-to-female transsexual suing her husband’s doctors for wrongful death, noted the confused landscape: “Taking this situation to its logical conclusion, Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Texas, is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Texas, and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male.” The Supreme Court declined to take the case.

Telcom immunity passes Senate, Clinton doesn't bother showing up to vote.

The Senate bill includes every single thing Bush wanted. One senator was mentioning with glee that not one of the amendments that could have caused a veto made it through. McCain show up to vote for immunity, Obama voted to oppose it. Not even the amendment that stipulated that this was the only legal eavesdropping program the president can create passed (this was Dianne Feinstein's, to give her credit for not being a complete shill). The lack of that amendment means a president can just make up a new spy program if for some reason (s)he find this law to be too constricting. Knowing this congress, they would just make it legal afterward anyway. The only way you can justify the striking down of these amendments is if you honestly believe the president has the right to spy on any person for any reason. I will be highly amused if Clinton - who's campaign is already Nixonesque - gets the nod and the right-wing echo chamber suddenly reverses its position with the kind of amnesia normally reserved for budget, midday soap opera programming. Here is a petition to the House not to back down. Their bill isn't perfect, but it doesn't include immunity. I also recommend calling your representatives.

Polls are projecting Barack Obama as the Winner of my Heart

He was against the war while Clinton was making a passionate speech for why it was necessary to give that decision to Bush, abdicating a key constitutional responsibility given to Congress (Section 8). He has the best policy on network neutrality and privacy rights - IE, keeping the internet from being a worthless telcom-dominated commercial enterprise. He has as much real political experience as Clinton (both relatively new Senators) and has actually gotten good government transparency legislation passed - a searchable database of where government money actually goes.

Telcom immunity

This is an easy story to tell and it is really easy to choose a side. In short: the Bush Administration asked some telecommunications companies to spy on their customers illegally. The ones that did it profited from it and now they want to be immune to the lawsuits filed against them by their spied-on customers. Glenn Greenwald probably said it best:

Telecom immunity entails virtually every corrupt, defining aspect of how our political system works: Telecoms have poured money into the coffers of key Senators, who then dutifully became their key advocates. Telecoms have sent a bipartisan cast of lobbyists (former government officials, of course, with incomparable access), to pressure key Senators, who swing their doors open wide for those lobbyists. And immunity is the most extremely illustration of what Sen. Obama calls "Lewis Libby Justice," as Congress passes a law with no purpose other than to protect retroactively the most well-connected private parties from the consequences of their lawbreaking.

If you feel that large corporations should be immune to criminal and civil prosecution because they donate enough money to Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller's campaigns, then by all means don't get involved. If you feel otherwise, I suggest you call them and ask them why they are trying so hard to push though immunity. Even if you support fewer checks on wiretapping for some reason, this is a highly corrupt way of going about it. If the Telcoms were doing nothing wrong, why do they need Congress-granted immunity? If the law needed to be changed, then that should have been done prior to the spying.

The Siege

It took me weeks to hunt down the movie The Siege. I watch it now for the ridiculously prescient dialog (see below). It should have a warning label now: "Although this film involves muslim terrorism suspects being mercilessly tortured by the US Military, it isn't in fact a documentary." That is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a whole section about a protest march - against the occupying military presence in New York - invoking the chant "no fear". While there is no military presence in New York (though the police are getting pretty close to a military presence), such a protest would warm my heart. Our fear of terrorism is going to end up far more dangerous to this country than actual terrorism. We always say we are willing to bleed and die for our freedoms, this is basically the test. If the Military Commissions Act and Patriot Act are any indication, we fail that test handedly.

Open Government Act Revitalizes FOIA

Good news for fans of a more transparent government (AP). For once the legislative branch of the United States does something right. Highlights: 1. "Presumption of disclosure" restored. Agencies should release information by default unless there is a reason not to. 2. It passed unanimously and with a large number of sponsors from both sides of the aisle (more likely to be veto-proof). 3. Twenty day deadline or the agency has to pay for the search and duplication fees - likely to lead to much faster turnaround time. 4. As mentioned in the AP story, this also works for government records held by third party contractors. I am proud but moderately surprised to see John Kyl (AZ) as one of the sponsors. I was pretty sure there would never be anything I would agree with him on. For once I can send him a note of actual support:

I'd like to express how happy I am with the Senator's support of the new Freedom of Information Act legislation he is sponsoring. A great republic such as ours requires accountability in its people and its government, and it sounds as if this will make it easier to assure such for the latter. Thank you.

What needs to happen now is the enforcement of current laws limiting the power of the executive specifically, rather than passing laws that justify the lawbreaking done by that branch. This is a good, though small, step away from the direction the country has been headed for six years.